This week’s Warcraft 30th anniversary celebration certainly brought its fair share of news, but if one thing got fans talking, it was the tease player housing is finally coming to World of Warcraft next year. And now Blizzard has shared a little more about the “most ambitious feature in a WoW expansion ever”, promising “years and years” of further growth when it arrives.
“Player housing is something that the team has definitely thought about and discussed for a long, long time, “World of Warcraft game designer Ion Hazzikostas explained during a recent roundtable interview attended by Eurogamer. “It’s certainly something the community has been asking for and wondering about for a long time, and that’s not lost on us.”
Hazzikostas continued that while the team might previously have had some hesitation in introducing player housing, it wasn’t a “philosophical” decision; rather, “We, frankly, were looking at what it would take to make it real and make it real at the quality level that our players expect and deserve… the customisation options, the underlying tech required to really have it feel integrated into the world. And in the past, many of those pieces just weren’t there… That made us choose between doing housing or doing literally everything else that went into an expansion, and everything else always won out in that balance of resources.”
Despite that, Hazzikostas revealed player housing is “something that we seriously began planning a design for and building out probably five years or so ago… We knew at the time this was not a feature that was going to fit within the development time frame of a single expansion, and so we’ve been kind of planning accordingly.”